Elm seeds are largely wind-dispersed, and it’s raining elm seeds on Nancy’s street in Rockville, Maryland. This rain is a reminder that in nature there is planted in all living things a system or an impulse for propagation. Political parties aren’t living entities in the same way that individual organisms are, but this is the season to be awake and aware that most political groups, even newly born ones, will do almost anything to grow strong and dominate all other systems.

THE POWER OF FEAR

In this week that I am in and around the nation’s capital, I am seeing clearly what the Republican strategists are doing; and if I were in their camp I would be thinking how very clever the propagandists are. This ingenious strategy is based on an understanding of the power of fear. The daily lives of many poorly educated, church-going or not-religious-at-all Americans are living with little relief under a cloud of fear. They are afraid if God doesn’t zap them, their mortgage holding banks or the law or some other governmental power will. If they don't have jobs they are afraid they won't ever be meaningfully employed, and if they have jobs they are afraid they may lose them.

Xenophobia is a fear that runs through many cultures; and the fear of strangers, of people who "are not like us," has often been a problem for American culture. In this time of economic distress, many otherwise reasonable citizens are looking around for something or someone to blame, and the most visible "others not like us" who can be seen as a reason "our own people" are not meaningfully employed are Latinos, Asians, and anybody who has come to America from any troubled part of the world.

The clever strategists pulling the strings of the Tea Party have recognized and understood that fear is a powerful motivator in religion and that fear can be an effective tool in politics. While the great prophets and teachers in virtually all religions based their theologies on the power of Goodness to relieve the burden of fear in the lives of people, there have always been infiltrators in religious organizations who use good people for unholy purposes by making them afraid. Elmer Gantry is alive and well in America’s fundamentalist Christian mega-churches. His story has been and will continue to be an ongoing saga. Anybody who has followed the development of the Tea Party phenomenon will recognize that the strongest advocates are fundamentalist Christians, the people who sit in congregations where people are told that God loves and blesses their closed conservatism and will damn them to hell if they depart from it.

The Tea Party is a partnership between controllers who understand and use fear as a motivator and a whole bunch of generally poorly educated and unsophisticated, basically good middle and lower income citizens hunkered down in fear believing that if they don’t demonstrate that they believe nonsense about blissful heaven and unthinkably horrible hell, God will get them; and if they they dare to believe in the goodness and rightness of any “socialized” care programs, the government will get them.

In the next election cycle the most troubling problem for Republican strategists in their effort to get a lock on the three branches of our government is the possibility of a nomination for office of a candidate who might not be supported by the conservative Christian base. Michelle Bachman, and Rick Perry have made it clear that they are rock-solid, born-again Christians who say there is no other way for anybody “to be saved” but through the blood of Jesus. A complication for Republican strategists in the next presidential election cycle is that Romney and Huntsman are Mormons, and fundamentalist Christianity has long preached that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is a cult whose members are not considered to be washed in the blood of Jesus and therefore not saved and therefore not Christians.

Please don’t misunderstand. My intention is not to malign Republicans or the Republican Party. What I want is good government... appropriate government... government by the people for the people. Government is best when it is hammered out in debate, when decisions are made by compromise. Tyranny happens when compromise is not an option. The stated goal of the Tea Party coalition in Congress is to stop government from being reformed by compromise. Compromise comes as the inevitable consequence of discussion and debate. Fundamentalists who have made up their minds on the subjects of religion and government despise debate and see no reason for it. While Catholicism “works” practically in the lives of its adherents because of the essential goodness and rightness of the basic principles of the Christian Gospel, as a political entity its historical record is often shameful because its government is based in fiat which is based on the rock-solid belief that the Pope is infallible and has the power to excommunicate and sentence dissidents to eternal hell. The power to damn a soul to hell is a mighty powerful and fearful tool. Among the most fundamentalist of Protestant denominations, control is as tightly held as it is in the Catholic Church. Some questions may not be asked. Certain ideas may not be discussed. A person buys the whole package of religious, social and political beliefs and is in, is “saved.” The individual who doubts to the point of deciding not to embrace a fundamentalist denomination’s declared social and/or political position, is out of fellowship.

It’s no wonder that the Tea Party rank-and-file members come mostly from groups of puppet people. Ultra conservative right-wing fundamentalists are, ironically, the most manipulated and controlled puppets in America. The irony lies in their memorized litany composed around words like liberty and freedom. They don’t seem to know they are being manipulated. They are encouraged to believe that if they question the party line or entertain ideas that are different from the preachings of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the declarations of Mitch McConnell and the Tea Party members of Congress, they and the whole country will be lost to oppressive, evil government. In fundamentalist religious groups, preachers make their living by delivering their fearful warnings of eternal damnation. Political preachers like Limbaugh and Beck keep a steady stream of political clap-trap beaming out over America from the studios of television and talk radio that are bought and paid for by powerful rich conservatives like the Texas Koch Brothers. Those of us who believe political debate is essential in a free society have a lot of work to do. This is not a time to be passive.